Baran was working at the famed RAND corporation on a “survivable” communications system in the early 1960s when he thought up one of its core concepts: breaking up a single message into smaller pieces, having them travel different, unpredictable paths to their destination, and only then putting them back together. It’s called packet switching and it’s how everything still gets gets to your e-mail inbox. The need to create a resilient network was considered critical in the early days of the Cold War, when fears of a nuclear attack on military command and control systems were especially ripe. Baran and others postulated that with near infinite redundancy on how a message could get from here to there, such a network could not be effectively destroyed — and was thus a credible deterrent to even trying.

Baran was working at the famed RAND corporation on a “survivable” communications system in the early 1960s when he thought up one of its core concepts: breaking up a single message into smaller pieces, having them travel different, unpredictable paths to their destination, and only then putting them back together. It’s called packet switching and it’s how everything still gets gets to your e-mail inbox. The need to create a resilient network was considered critical in the early days of the Cold War, when fears of a nuclear attack on military command and control systems were especially ripe. Baran and others postulated that with near infinite redundancy on how a message could get from here to there, such a network could not be effectively destroyed — and was thus a credible deterrent to even trying.